Untitled (#36)

When shifting careers from poetry to art-making late in life, Anne Ryan trained with painter Hans Hofmann and printmaker Stanley William Hayter, two leading abstract artists of her day. Hayter encouraged students at his workshop, called Atelier 17, to explore new forms and techniques, and Ryan responded with a series of relief prints based on automatic drawings. Inspired by the found-object collages of German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, she continued her experiments with abstraction through a series of mixed-media fabric and paper constructions, creating around four hundred such works between 1948 and her death in 1954. Many of Ryan’s first collages, including Untitled (#36), feature fragments of paper with printed text, indecipherable hints of the artist’s daily activities and surroundings in New York City. Tattered scraps of fabric, crumbled papers, and sometimes foil, string, or cellophane, add a rich variety of textures and colorful patterns.